“Well, we were all in the same boat,” was a common reply when asked about living in Houston County’s Winnebago Creek Valley during the Great Depression of the 1930s. “There was no one nearby with which to compare their circumstances. We had plenty (of) food to eat, and the rest didn’t matter.” Unlike city dwellers, mostly self-sufficient farm folks did not need to earn money to obtain food, observed Barbara Scottston and Terry Atherton in their book, “A Creek Runs Through Me.”
Some log cabins were so small that families were said to have slept in shifts. Some wood frame houses had walls with no insulation. In one old house, the family arose mornings to find frost on their blankets. Children “slept in their hats with the ear flaps tied down.”
The extension of electric power lines into the valley was delayed during the early 1940s, due to World War II. However, some farmhouses did not have electricity, even up into the 1960s. When modern conveniences did make their way into the valley, it was bewildering to some who had lived nearly a lifetime without convenience. One elderly farmer, confounded when his youngest son eagerly embraced modern improvements on the farm, commented, “He’s built this big outdoor fireplace he calls a barbeque just so they can cook their food outside. Seems pretty backward to me. They are moving the cooking out of-doors, and biffy indoors.”
However, many of those who lived through those decades of poverty were not eager to discuss details of those hard times, which once survived were best forgotten. But poverty and hard times were life-changing situations, especially for some young folks. “Poverty, plus too many children, meant a family could not adequately care for its brood,” stated Scottston and Atherton.
Richard and Ann Brady Fleming were so impoverished they hired out their children for work on local farms. Descendants of one son, Francis, related that he worked at a neighboring farm at age seven. His wages included food, but the farmer’s wife was “very stingy’ with the food involved.
There were several instances when the death of one parent required “a reduction in family size.” Even without legal adoption, these “take-in” kids sometimes resided permanently with a substitute family. Dennis and Mary Brady sent their young son to their local priest so that he could be prepared for the priesthood, and he indeed did become a priest.
Grandma Hurley died when she was about 45 years old and son Frank was about 14. There was also a new baby, a 2-year-old among other youngsters. One girl, Alice, was adopted in town by the Kelly family, and another girl, Pearl, joined the Weymiller household.
Young brothers Jim and Tom Ziemet, after their mother died in childbirth with her ninth child, were placed by a Catholic priest with two Kenney families, related by marriage. Tom was raised by Pete and Josephine Kenney Meinertz, while Jim grew up with Ed and Josephine Imhoff Kenney. Jim was a third grader in 1937 when he and brother Tom (five years older) spent the night together with the Kenneys. But when Tom left and went alone to the Meinertz family, Jim learned they each had a new family.
Two other siblings went to Bloomer, Wis., but six of the children “lived on-and-off with a grandmother and were farmed out for various periods – a few years here and there.”
Take-in kids had varying upbringings. Jim reported he was treated like a “prince,” in an arrangement that was positive for all concerned. But not so for Tom, whose new parents were very strict while raising Tom until age 17. One day, probably around 1940, on the way home from New Albin where Pete Meinertz had consumed some alcohol, he informed Tom, “You don’t have to stay here anymore.” Tom stopped the car and walked back to New Albin, never to reside with the family again. Reaching New Albin on foot, Tom purchased a jar of olives with his two dollars, tied his belongings in a bundle on a stick over his shoulder and walked on to Lansing. Although under age, he was able to enlist in the Navy, the beginning of a 26-year military career, encompassing World War II.
After his father died – possibly when a barn burned down – Oscar Smerud, according to local lore, was adopted by a young childless couple, John and Sarah Ryan. The 1900 census enumerated Oscar Smerud, age 22, as a “boarder.” Oscar eventually owned the family farm.
Even during the Great Depression, life on the farm was not all that much different than the preceding decades. In the early 1900s, brothers Garrett and Jeremiah Welsh, according to one of their school teachers, “would eat their school lunch out in the woodshed – outdoors, even in cold weather, because they were embarrassed because the other kids had sandwiches.”
As soon as the snow melted each spring, the Welsh boys stopped wearing shoes. One day in April, the valley received four or five inches of snow and then enough rain that a crust formed on top of the snow. When their teacher was leaving school, she saw blood on the snow where the barefooted brothers had walked up the hill. The Welsh farmhouse had no well, and there were no springs on Jefferson Ridge. They used water from the cattle’s pond.
“With no rural welfare system to help the needy, charity did begin at home,” assured Scottston and Atherton. A few resorted to thievery, “but this may have occurred under the averted eyes of the victim.” To survive, the Enockson family was known to be “a little bit light-fingered.” They would swipe corn from a neighboring cornfield and take it to Eitzen to sell. One victimized farmer took no action. When Jim Steele cut some corn, shocked it and then would take some ears into Eitzen to sell, the storeowners told him they already had some of his corn. He replied, it “was alright, because they had to eat, too.”
Source: “A Creek Runs Through Me; A History of the Winnebago Creek Valley in Southeastern Minnesota” by Barbara Scottston and Terry Atherton, 2013.
Photo courtesy of Houston County Historical Society